By Satya Narayan Misra in Bhubaneswar, September 16, 2025: Those clear eyes noticed everything. In a restaurant how the table cloths were wrong. How a colleague’ tie, 1.5 cm too long spoilt the balance of his outfit, and how much of the angle of a woman’s glove was too much to show. That was not a matter of inches but of millimetres. Though he made no rule about it, at work he was “Georgio” to one. He was “Signor Armani”, the arbiter of every detail of his life.

So, when faced with that classic of English tailoring, a man’s suite, he had to change it. It punished the beautiful male body, squashing it in to a box. What he demanded off a suit was freedom to move: to kneel before a model or a mannequin with a mouthful of pins to dress them. He took the stiffness out, replacing heavy wool with crepe and choosing softer colour: beige, sand, light green. He dismissed shoulder pads and snipped away the lining. He lengthened the jacket, enlarged the lapels, lowered the buttons. And there stood the Armani Man. What Channel did for women. Is what he did for men. Channel freed women from corsets, and Armani freed men from their rigid suits.

He changed the way women looked too. His suits gave a fluid confidence without rigidity of tight trousers and skirts and hid ungainly legs. He also loved to put women in flowing, simple evening gown, tastefully beaded and in the colour o faded flowers. When designs were this good, when colours were this natural, and the whole look breathed elegance, not extravagance, why chase after fleeting trends?

He was not the first Italian tailor to redesign English suits, but he was the first runaway success at it. His company, founded in 1975, chalked up a sale of $14,000 in the first year. By 2024 it was worth $10 billion and branched in to sportswear, furnishings, hotels, clubs, chocolates and floristry. It was possible, if clients had enough money, to live an Armeni lifestyle in Armeni worlds, where all was natural sophistication, harmony and ease.

One key to his success was his simplicity. His lines were loose, comfortable and unfussy, and his more down market range. But the chief secret of his stellar rise was cinema. Ashe grew up in northern Italy it was the best of entertainment, endlessly inspiring him. To him, life was cinema and his clothes were his costumes. So, when in 1980, his style flew to fame on the back of Richard Gere in “American Gigolo”, it was a heady moment, and one that lasted.

“Then the magical moment, where the shirts are on the bed and Gere throws ties on the shirt, was so right for the time. It was about his choices; it was throwing away the whole story of the way men dress.” Stars on and off the red carpet took up his look: Diane Keaton, Tom Cruise, Sean Connery, Julia Roberts, Tina Turner, Kevin Costner, and his hero Martin Scorsese. In 1983, he set up an office in Los Angeles; sometimes he gave his clothes away. No stylist had ever courted Hollywood so well.

Yet star endorsements did not go on to his head. He was shy, and admitted that he got into fashion almost by accident. There had been no spark, no sacred Muse, he toyed with being a doctor, and then served in the army, before wondering off to dress windows. From then, fashion slowly stole life away. By 1964 he was designing a menswear line for Nino Cerruti. After that he set with Sergio. His absolutist ways hid a lingering insecurity about his role in the serious business, the public service of fashion. That was also why he worked, morning and night, getting everything as perfect as possible. This was the life he had chosen for himself, wrapped tight in sartorial chains. He had ideas to sketch out, fabric to look at, and the next show to plan.

His clothes, chocolates, coffee and cutlery are sold along a Via Armani of Milanese shops, and the city has an Armeni café, night club and hotels. Despite the proliferation of Armani outlets worldwide, he remained wary of massmarketing, and balanced it with his belief in a discretion that’slays vulgarity’. No naffness was permitted in the hotel with his name that opened in 2011 in Dubai, where he designed and styled interiors. He also had to think of the future. Who would really ensure the correct buttons on the jackets, hold the fort against violent colours, insist on the size of his blue glass flower cubes, and achieve the perfect lighting for his shows? Unless he could make himself immortal, he feared no one could.

In the 1970s, Giorgio Armani anticipated two cultural shifts: rise in the cult of the gym, which made every man’s physique his responsibility, rather than a tailor’s; and end of constriction in men’s clothing. He challenged ideas about the male suit as they had been constructed since the 1790s. That ease of design he created is a lesson in branding. Are clothes enduring not because they announce themselves, but because they whisper? That is Armani’s legacy: a style that does not demand attention, but holds it quietly. Tarun Tahiliani, the Indian couturier writes: ‘For Indian designers, his life is a reminder that vision is not futile, clarity is not arrogance and restraint is not compromise. They are all strengths, that really represents passing of an era.’